A Degrowth Housing Vision for Maine
If we are to be intentional about equitably meeting human needs and prospering within ecological boundaries, I believe we need to do the work of imagining that world first if we want to create it.
If we are to be intentional about equitably meeting human needs and prospering within ecological boundaries, I believe we need to do the work of imagining that world first if we want to create it.
This article is an attempt to seriously engage with socialist ecomodernism in a way the interview failed to do with degrowth: on its own terms.
Perhaps, the larger purpose of degrowth scholarship (and conversations like these) is to act as Overton Windows – to help people imagine and actualize behaviors and networks that will help us adjust in a post-growth world.
The Degrowth & Strategy volume makes a case that, to bring about shared goals of eco-social transformation, we need to collaboratively bring together, honor, reflect critically on, and deliberate about a wide mix of approaches.
Degrowthers have, somewhat unjustly, been criticised for not having a strategy. This book is an attempt to fill that perceived gap.
While there are considerable political challenges involved in realizing the goals outlined here, we can improve the political feasibility of them by challenging the neoliberal narrative about the causes of the current crisis and its possible solutions.
We need not lose sight of the true meaning of a holiday, where we socially waste our time together to eat, drink, and be merry. So, I ask you, as this year comes to a close, to not forget to come in and know me better, man!
The idea is to try to bring degrowth’s abstract ideas to the ground and think more concretely about the metabolisms, policies, economics and politics that can make degrowth REAL.
Brian Czech once likened modern economic growth to a runaway train. This metaphor drives home the point that to save nature and humanity from an ecological train wreck, the most important thing is to decelerate the global economy.
Sustainability means living as nature lives. It means no depletion of the elements of the ecosystem humans have been treating as economic resources, and no waste. What we pursue is up that tree.
When I go in search of figures, numbers, data, about energy in relation to ecology and economy, I’m often brought to the website of the very same EPA whose lead scientist studying sewage sludge faked his science and unleashed a toxic torrent upon the world.
Understand having “anything and everything-all of the time” is no longer an option in a world on fire. Halve your cake so that maybe together we can continue eating it.